'I'm gonna fuck your brains out, cunt!'
My no comes from the goddess
Deep inside the dark cave of my body,
From my blood and bones and womb,
For once my father is silent.

—Alison Stone (in Harris 2000, p. 285)

What the survivors said was speech; the pornography had been throughout their lives,
a means of actively suppressing their speech. They had been turned into pornography
in life and made mute; terrorized by it and made mute. Now the mute spoke.

—Andrea Dworkin (1997, p. 91), 'Beaver Talks'

In her 1987 work, Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin invites her readers to
consider how heterosexual coitus, defined and delimited by male power,
operates as a sexually political practice, a ritual that positions women as space

* Parts of this article first appeared in Caputi (2003). I want to thank Jennifer Rycenga
and Brooke Bailey for their generous and most helpful critical readings of this piece.

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